Success and the Years We Lost
Oneida is forced to postpone their gig with Terry and the Cops but the show must go on
A few weeks ago I talked with drummer John “Kid Millions” Colpitts about his band Oneida’s new record, Success, (which came out yesterday), and about their August 20th show in Pittsburgh with Terry and the Cops, a very good band featuring members of Oneida’s longtime friends the Dirty Faces. In addition to touring together, Oneida’s Jagjaguwar imprint Brah released two Dirty Faces records, Superamerican and Get Right With God, and the two bands booked enough shows in each other’s cities that some Pittsburghers assumed Brooklyn-based Oneida was a local band.
Sadly, Colpitts caught the ‘vid and this week’s reunion was not to be. Terry Carroll, former Dirty Faces frontman and the titular Terry, says they’re working on rescheduling with “the O,” but in the meantime the Cops will appear at the Brillobox tonight with fellow Rickety Records’ band Anita Fix, in from NYC, and Sell Farm from Denver. Carroll explains via text that the show will function as the tape release party they never had for 2021’s The Years We Lost: Mixtape 2, “meanwhile #3 is on the way … not to mention all the actual new songs we’ve got lined up to release after that.”
I marvel that Carroll is a songwriting machine and he corrects me:
My love of the Dirty Faces specifically and music/art collective Rickety Records generally has been well documented, and I’m planning a longer piece on the Onedia/Rickety love story sometime in the future.
In the meantime you can listen to Success, a fantastically muscular, hook-y, funny, wild rock record. Twenty-five years in, Oneida cannot help but sound like Oneida, meaning (among other things) that there are extended, driving jams which bear little relation to the kind of noodley mush one sometimes associates with the word “jam.” While “psychedelic” is a word that comes up over and over again in describing Oneida’s catalog, Grayson Currin makes a good point that, in relation to this band, it’s a word that feels too soft.
Former Dirty Faces drummer Leah McManigle describes Oneida and Dirty Faces as kindred bands, though she says Oneida has weathered the better part of three decades by being more functional, productive and communicative than your average rock group. The Dirty Faces, on the other hand, were notoriously chaotic, self-destructive and hard to wrangle. In contrast, the members of Oneida were, in McManigle’s words, “upstanding citizens” who weren’t dealing with the substance abuse problems that very obviously plagued certain members of the Dirty Faces.
McManigle says, “These guys stuck their neck out for us and they wanted to drag us along kicking and screaming … Believe me, as a group we didn’t much care about what other people thought of us but we cared what Oneida thought. And they loved us. And they still do.”
If you’re in Pittsburgh, info for tonight’s show is here.